Royal Palace, "asian queues"

We visited the Royal Palace today, it was very blingy and palatial, at least the temple grounds part. 

We also got to do "asian queuing" which is a bit of a misnomer.  It's kind of a funny thing, seemed to get under Tori's skin more than mine, I theorize because she's a little shorter and therfore a bit more "in" the mele.  Maybe if I grew up in over populated areas I'd develop the same habits.  Everyone wants to be first, even if there's a thousand people jamming towards a small opening, and even if jamming is counterproductive for the group (there's no coordinated group thinking) - it's even more pronounced here than at the passport line at the airport.  There's no rationalization that the "ill" tradeoff of clawing your way one spot forward means nothing more than saving one second.  There's no apparent social stigma about queue jumping or budging in line.  If you're just walking, someone can cut a millimeter in front of you.  To test if they actually think that's rude, I did the cutoff in varying degrees of assertiveness to a few different age groups - it doesn't even look like it registered to them, they're well conditioned.  It's just the way it is. 

In terms of packing the lineups tight, if it feels gay, it's about right.  There should be no space in front of you, your junk should be within a hair of brushing that dude or granny in front of you (ie. "cropdusting" is the norm here, not the exception). 

Being a head above makes it all more humorous/tolerable... and allows me to take a few pictures.  There's a lot of people going home from the hubub today with useless pictures where the bottom third is 20 heads of black hair milling about.  They must not think highly of me as my pictures are just of the buildings.  It seems the preferred way to go is a) give your friend your camera, b) walk to desired spot and show them how to frame it, c) pull out hanky to wipe sweat from your brow and face, d) pull comb and mini mirror out of pocket and fix'er up a litte, e) strike a pose as best you can like how you see magazine ad models doing, then finally f) let your friend know it's ok to click a shot.  It's odd to me, but that's what I'm seeing over and over again.

If there were a stampede here, look out grannies and toddlers, you're gonna have a rough go of it getting trampled, it's totally ripe for disaster.  If I were feeble it'd seem like walking around in a potential death trap, but given the demographic of the palace tourists this morning I think I'd be a survivor.

We donned our covered toe shoes and long sleeve shirts in addition to walking over with pants - if this was day 1 of the trip I may feel near death in the heat and congestion, but somehow today the over 30C high humidity plus direct sun and huge crowds now seem fine.  All the tourist books are right that you should dress that way in here, there were guards pulling people out of line for non compliance, and as a whitey it's probably harder to slip through, but in actuality enforcement is like 60%, just try not to wear anything too far off the mark.  There's too many people to do it that completely.

Here's a few temple pics, plus they have a replica model of Angkor Wat.